In a final gesture of defiance towards the Soviet system that he had demolished, Boris Yeltsin was laid to rest yesterday after Russia's first Orthodox state funeral for more than a century.

It was an emotional but historic occasion, a symbolic break with the country's Communist past that most Russians marked with indifference or introspection rather than grief. The day had begun with an ornate service, fittingly held at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, in Moscow, blown up on Stalin's orders in 1931 but rebuilt by Mr Yeltsin.

Then, thousands lined the streets as the body of Russia's first democratically elected leader was borne to the Novodevichy cemetery on an olive-green gun carriage.

His family and the leaders who shaped the first years of the post-Cold War world followed in solemn procession - among them Sir John Major, Lech Walesa, Bill Clinton and a frail-looking George Bush, for whom the short walk clearly took its toll. As Mr Yeltsin's body was placed over the grave, his family paid an emotional final farewell. Naina Yeltsin, his widow, caressed her husband's face and kissed his eyes, nose and mouth before she was led away by her two daughters. His coffin was then lowered into the ground to the sounds of a three-gun salute and, in perhaps the most ironic moment of the day, the strains of the Russian national anthem played to its Soviet-era tune, banned by Mr Yeltsin but reintroduced by his successor. It was the only issue for which he ever criticised Vladimir Putin in public. The anthem aside, everything was as Mr Yeltsin would have wished. Gone were the parades through Red Square and free drinks for the workers that characterised burials of Soviet-era leaders, who - with the exception of the disgraced Nikita Khrushchev - were buried by the walls of the Kremlin.

Instead his final resting place was among the greats of 20th century Russian culture, the likes of authors Gogol and Bulgakov, composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich and the opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin. Khrushchev, who died unloved after a similarly isolated retirement, lies there too.

He was laid between a ballerina, an illusionist and an actor - a suitable spot for a man who styled himself as a populist.

Later, at a wake in the Kremlin, Mr Putin, who has turned back many of Mr Yeltsin's democratic reforms since he came to power in 2000, paid tribute to him. "He changed the face of power and tore down the blind wall between society and the state," he said. "He sincerely tried to do everything to make the lives of millions of Russians better. We will move towards those goals."

The first Orthodox state funeral since Tsar Alexander III in 1894, it was a seminal moment for the Russian church whose rebirth after decades of Soviet persecution largely took place in the Yeltsin years. Gallery